The World Lays You Down (re-upload)
by Petrich0rr
Summary: Enjolras and Grantaire were best friends as children, but time and unknown circumstances has wrenched that bond from them and broken it beyond repair. Re-uploaded because I needed to fix a load of silly mistakes.


Enjolras cannot stand Grantaire.

He cannot stand to listen to him discourage every word he says with a cynical counter argument, cannot stand seeing him pickle his liver with wines and spirits and smoke himself to an early grave. Most of all, Enjolras cannot stand looking into Grantaire's strange eyes and seeing what once shone with vitality now half-dead with weariness. Grantaire had seen too much in his short lifespan, and it had defeated him; he was far too young to have eyes so old. Enjolras couldn't look into the eerie grey-blue irises without feeling sick to his stomach.

But he doesn't _hate_ Grantaire.

He does, however, hate what his hard life has turned him into. Every time Enjolras is told that Grantaire is in hospital waiting to have his stomach pumped yet _again, _or when someone reports to him that he has refused to leave his bed for three days now; when the revolutionary sees him ignore his friends - even young, impressionable Gavroche - or his work or his talents in favour of his liquor…

…Well, Enjolras would be lying if he said that it didn't make disgust bubble low in his stomach. At first - and he is not proud to admit this - the disgust was aimed towards Grantaire himself. For giving up, refusing to look out for himself or anyone around him. For not caring about anything other than the bottle of absinthe cradled to his chest. His eyes would always watch Grantaire in contempt as the latter poured more and more wine down his throat, and his tongue would always be sharp when he directed speech at the drunkard, barely able to keep his temper in check.

It had taken a bollocking from Éponine and Cosette to make him see that Grantaire needed support, not constant chastisement. That it was addiction and unresolved and undiagnosed mental illness that made him this way, not he himself. So Enjolras has dampened the distaste in his eyes down to little more than offhanded pity, but failed to grasp that that makes Grantaire feel _worse_, not better. He leaves the 'support' to their other friends, comfort and emotions not being his area of expertise, much to Grantaire's dismay - not that the latter would ever admit this.

He hates everything that has happened to their relationship, mainly because when he _can_ bring himself to stare Grantaire directly in the eye, the boy he once knew was entirely lost to him. This… this _shell_of a person was not Grantaire as he should be, or even what he used to be. This dirty-haired, puffy-eyed, whippet-thin man with the crooked nose and heavily scarred arms was not the Grantaire that Enjolras knew as a child.

Grantaire and Enjolras had been neighbours growing up together in the suburbs of Paris. Though both from moderately wealthy families (Enjolras more so than Grantaire, not that the latter ever had to go without), they had difficult home lives. Enjolras' was an only child and his parents were cold and distant towards him, his mother constantly away on business trips and his father forever drumming into him endless stereotypical nonsense about the disgrace that failure brought and what it took to be a 'real man'. Grantaire had a similarly dysfunctional family. After his older sister Élodie had died after being hit by a car when Grantaire was seven, his parents went through months of hurling insults and blame (also occasionally fists and expensive ornaments) at each other before Grantaire was being forced through a messy custody battle that eventually his father won. He never heard from his mother after that day, and the death of his sister had broken his father beyond repair. Alcoholism seemed to be a trait that ran in the family.

As a consequence of their messy home lives, Grantaire and Enjolras looked to each other for comfort. But beyond emotional support they also happened to compliment each other perfectly (though these days all they did was clash). Growing up, Enjolras had been too quiet and too intense for his own good, and Grantaire had always been the one to bring him out of his shell. Similarly, Enjolras was the one to stop Grantaire from running his mouth off or doing something entirely stupid, like the time Grantaire had wanted to climb to the top of the climbing frame in the playground at school despite the fact that he had broken his leg days prior. When getting up to mischief and scheming together in the way little boys did, Grantaire was the one with the imagination to come up with the ideas and Enjolras was the one with the logic and intelligence to carry them out. They were the perfect partners in crime, even their teachers would joke that with their combined genius they could easily organise several bank heists when they grew up.

Grantaire-the-child had been beautiful, in every sense of the word. He was often capable of thoughtful and intelligent conversation from a very young age, and was so ridiculously talented that Enjolras would burn with jealousy when he picked up a paintbrush or sat at a piano. Enjolras may have been passionate and eager to learn, but his intelligence and his achievements all came from insane amounts of hard work and sheer force of will. He had not a creative bone in his body. For Grantaire however, everything came to him as easily as breathing. He was capable of so much, which only made his demise harder to watch.

Above all, Grantaire had been strong. Both physically and mentally. Though he often looked like he carried the entire weight of the world on his shoulders, Grantaire had kept his spirit alive with hope that his future would be brighter. He was _optimistic. _He and Enjolras would sit together on the grass in the park and Grantaire would paint pictures of their futures together with his words. Bright, idealistic pictures that were _happy. _Simple, but happy.

They had grown apart in high school as childhood friends often did. Enjolras continued to be a high-flyer and began devoting all his time to a student group called Les Amis de l'ABC that campaigned for social justice and equality for all (when he had first joined, he and Grantaire had still been friends and Grantaire used to take the piss out of him and call him 'Chairman Mao' and a Bolshevik). His grades were immaculate, he never set a toe out of line, he was part of nearly every extra-curricular activity the school had to offer, in other words: he was perfect.

But while this was happening, Grantaire found himself on a downwards spiral to the path of his own self-destruction that Enjolras has never to this day found out the root cause of. The artist began drinking and smoking pot, he ignored his studies and his friends (especially Enjolras, who he would do little more than sneer at whenever the blonde would try and reach out to him), he attendance was abysmal and he'd often go days without putting in an appearance at school, his formerly exemplary grades plummeted to next to nothing, he would stagger into school with his forearms wrapped in bandages and his face blackened and bruised. He quickly gained status as a total slut from boys and girls alike. In other words, Grantaire was a complete mess.

By their last year at high school together, they were strangers. They didn't ever acknowledge each other in the hall, they had no classes together, they had different friend groups. Enjolras ended up at Université Pierre et Marie Curie and Grantaire left with no qualifications to his name.

Truthfully, Enjolras had no idea what became of Grantaire until the latter staggered into the Musain one night with Éponine Thénardier, a friend of Marius'. Les Amis had kept up their plight all through university and were inching closer and closer day by day to becoming an official organisation. Every week they staged unofficial debates in the Café Musain on Rue Saint-Hyacinthe that they invited anyone to join. Marius had bought his neighbour Éponine one week, and after the meeting she had asked if she could bring someone herself for the next meeting. Enjolras had complied at the time, but looking back he rather wished he hadn't.

He remembers the moment when Grantaire had walked in clear as day. After Enjolras recognised his face - looking significantly worser for wear from their high school days - he didn't know whether he was going to throw up or faint, and he nearly did both. Grantaire himself had stopped dead in his tracks and whispered 'fucking hell' but - instead of leaving, like Enjolras was both hopeful and sure he would do - he hesitantly sat down and watched Enjolras with his _terrible _jaded gaze, making awful comments and going against everything that was said in a way the old Grantaire never would.

He had been back with Éponine every week since, and every single on of the Amis were in agreement that Enjolras had not had the same determined fire in him since. That he seemed… distant. Tired. Of course, nobody knew about their history aside from the two men themselves, though they never acknowledged it out loud.

The most devastating thing, though? Sometimes when Enjolras watches Grantaire from the corner of his eye he is reminded of the ten year old boy from his youth with the enigmatic grin and razor-sharp wit. Occasionally the artist watches Enjolras without checking to make sure he had kept his face carefully apathetic first, and his head will be cocked to the side and something _ever so slightly _akin to the fire his blue-grey eyes used to hold seemed to ignite when he watched the revolutionary, but of course it was nowhere near as powerful or influential as it once was.

He could barely sit still during their meetings - or ever, really - and would fidget and complain, tapping his fingers and jiggling his knees until Enjolras would snap and tell him to stop being so annoying. It was _so alike _the old Grantaire.

When he wasn't ridiculing everything that Enjolras said he would occasionally pull out an old stubby pencil and sketch quietly on a napkin or a beermat. It was the only time Enjolras saw him displaying signs of his former talents, and even when he was drawing stupidly exaggerated caricatures of Enjolras to mock him further, it filled the blonde's heart with hope. Just for a split second. Maybe his Grantaire wasn't entirely lost after all. He was still as brilliant and as witty and as _impossible _as he had been as a child.

But then it would all come crumbling down, and Grantaire would retreat back to his fortress of despair and solitude that was so alien to Enjolras and the Amis that they didn't know how to address it. None of them knew where it came from, or what triggered it. It would take a simple 'That drawing is brilliant, Grantaire - you could make serious money from doing something like that!' or a heat-of-the-moment catty comment from Enjolras or an attempt by the blonde at an easy, friendly conversation (that shocked them both equally) to make Grantaire sit back and plaster this awful smirk across his face, saying something deliberately off-handed and sarcastic while his eyes screamed out in silent terror.

The Amis joke that Enjolras is merely a statue made of cold marble and is incapable of human thought or emotion, but he knows that's not true.

And it hurts him. It hurts a lot.


End file.
